FOR India to launch its tourism communication initiative on the plank of ‘incredible’ is a clear sign of some confusion about consumer behaviour. Is India an incredible destination because whatever is seen and experienced is somewhat unbelievable? Or is it a reality that may never unfold before those who flock to see it? Or are we as a nation, perhaps one of the few to encompass a broad spectrum of appeal, trying to build a brand in isolation of the region and its competitive profile? The more serious argument is one that questions whether a brand can be built when the product is itself intrinsically weak, therefore, creating expectation of memorable experiences which may well be belied.

The tourism debate in this country is not about tourism alone; it is far deeper than is made out to be. It is not about night bazaars and monuments hosting evening soirees. Nor is it about pretty pictures and advertisements in international and national media vehicles, and certainly not about global summits which just happen to be hosted in our country. It is essentially about the attitude we as a nation have, first to brand building and, within that, to specific targeting. It is here that we are often found wanting. It is a sobering thought that India today attracts fewer tourists than Singapore, a city-state. Equally worrying is the lack of comprehensive infrastructure to support flexible price-point tourism. While we need to be justifiably proud of chains like The Oberoi, The Taj and ITC Hotels, the spread needs to be more even which it is not. The linkages in terms of connectivity are equally miserable as are our access points, be they rail terminals or airports.

The reasons for this malaise are many but the manner in which they have so far been addressed remains insular. Tourism as an industry cannot be built by a single ministry, nor for that matter by one government. It must emanate from the recognition of the potential that the tourism industry provides for employment on the one hand and national showcasing on the other. We have instead viewed tourism from a silo-perspective with the result that we have not progressed as much as we should have.

The problems begin with the connotation of tourism as elitist, reflective of a socialist mindset that we are so keen to foster. It is this mind-set that does not allow us to create flexible price points for land acquisition for tourism-related industries which means that the hotels we have today are almost all in the luxury bracket, even within their target segment simply because of artificially propped up real-estate prices. And while we have replaced socialism with unfettered capitalism, we today have a government that is still held to ransom by a shrill Left which believes that any opening up of the economy is anathema to the poor.

 

Which brings me to the critical contribution of tourism. This industry is the country’s biggest employment generator. Less understood is that it generates employment and therefore income across skill-sets and income groups – a fact that we have not been able to market within the government, leading to the disconnects that exist between ministries. There is no nodal ministry that guides the tourism initiative, establishing once again the silo mindset that continues to afflict Brand India.

The more significant issue is one of marketing per se. We have no methodology of capturing either satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Worse, when people write in or complain, we have no means of quick redressal, simply because various arms leading to the tourism experience are in different management buckets. Hence, a vacuum is created as far as setting things right is concerned or for that matter, implementing course-correction where required. This causes grave dissonance in the minds of the consumer.

 

I believe the essentials of marketing have been ignored in building Brand India. There are several recipients of the Brand India messaging and one critical target group we have often ignored is the resident Indian – the domestic traveller, as it were. Somehow the oft-repeated mistake made by those who run tourism and manage its potential and growth is that they believe that the money will flow in from foreign tourists alone, unmindful of the vast disposable surpluses amongst our own people today, some of which could easily be harnessed for the growth of tourism. Here too, imagination in creating destinations and providing all-spectrum appeal options is sadly lacking.

For example, even today, almost six decades since independence, we have no plan to create motels on highways which are the lifeline of the country. Take a look at the development that Haryana made with regard to government-run and managed motels under the stewardship of a forward thinking bureaucrat at the time. This has stood Haryana in good stead for two reasons: it created destinations at very little cost since most often the resort is the destination. Also these motels were set up at relatively low costs since they did not need to compete with artificially high prices which would be prevalent in the larger cities. Such investment in destination-creation has been missing ever since we took a hard look at tourism in our country.

Tourism is about planning ahead. But then, like in most areas concerned with infrastructure, we plan almost post-facto rather than in advance, which means undue pressure on existing facilities leading to a pitiable experience. And here the definition of infrastructure needs to be expanded. There is no point talking about airport upgradation unless we can also work on the surrounding features that are part of any decent airport brand-promise: from restaurants and lounges to the kind of transport options we have, to the staff that is employed at the airport. It is this holistic thinking that is needed if we are at all serious about tourism as a critical priority.

 

The worldview with which we look at tourism is equally important. There can be no easy solution and tourism is perhaps one industry which suffers tremendously if handled with a tokenist perspective, just what we have been doing for the last several years. The attitude is that things will take care of themselves. They never do. Another myth that needs to be exploded is that tourism can be taken care of through private initiatives alone. It never works.

Tourism is one industry which desperately needs state intervention since the task is more about getting different arms of the government to work together rather than work distinctly. There is need for state intervention since its success is also dependent on the fiscal incentives that could (and should) be offered to those who are looking at investing in this sector. There is also a need, and soon enough at that, to look at tourism education with some seriousness. It is indeed sad that while we have so much to offer, the people involved are to a large extent untrained and irresponsible, be it a forest ranger or for that matter a certified tourist guide. But this is exactly the software that needs course-correction.

A key aspect of any tourism initiative is that it needs to draw from the cultural moorings of the people offering the product. Sadly enough, we must come to terms with the fact that while we believe we are a hospitable nation, in reality we are not. We don’t warm up to tourists easily and if we do, we interfere with every guarded step they take: be it on our streets or within the precincts of our monuments. Even our pricing policy is discriminatory rather than welcoming. Nowhere is this more visible than in the entry ticket price for the Taj Mahal in Agra.

This dichotomy in the ‘welcoming’ pattern first needs to be addressed and no amount of advertising campaigns, be they the one just launched ‘Atithi Deva Bhavo’ or its ilk, will ever work in a country where the basic template of tourism is lacking. This will only happen if people genuinely believe tourism can and will be an economic powerhouse: it is this that needs to be communicated rather than campaigns, which will be forgotten with the season they are run in.

 

The solutions to creating a vibrant tourism are many and need to be approached with a certain science rather than in fits and starts. It is the haphazardness of the way we handle tourism that is the problem. I believe the time has come for every Indian to take tourism in its entirety: be it imparting a certain criticality as far as the state is concerned, encouraging individual enterprise, or investing the industry with the empowerment of knowledge. Training is a key ingredient to our march forward; even countries like Colombia and Mexico have realised the potential of tourism, which in reality goes far beyond tourism alone. Tourism is that window to the outside world which enables a positioning of country brands as a great trigger for investment – something that escapes our successive governments.

 

What could possibly be the way forward and how best should we go about it? I would recommend a series of steps, most of which need to be implemented simultaneously for two reasons: they cannot be implemented in stages and frankly every day that we spend in ignoring the real problems afflicting our tourism business, we allow other countries to take away the tourists meant for us. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our domestic tourism.

The affluent Indian today would prefer to holiday in the Far East than in India both because of prohibitive travel costs and unrealistic lodging tariffs and here we are talking about very basic affluence and not the kind who would prefer Machu Pichu to Kulu-Manali. Then there is the additional issue of marketing and the political situation in most of our attractive destinations. I am amazed that no one in the last 58 years has either had the political will or the economic determination to show people (both Indians and foreigners) the beauty of the Northeast, allowing silly laws, such as the need for inner line permits and their like, to still pervade. This is how we naturally kill tourism.

There is also the problem that tourism policy-makers have little real sense of actual consumer needs, of how we could have targeted certain consumer groups within the tourism domain. This is something that we will need to resolve. It is for this reason that for several decades Kashmir was allowed to languish. Then there is the issue of dressing up our destinations on which, once again, we have a miserable track record. All of Himachal suffers from poor air and rail connectivity and the highways linking one place to another in the state are now dotted with auto-repair garages, thus creating a sight which is both disgusting and dangerous: again, the political will is lacking.

 

The first step would be to create a one-window tourism body, a body which would override the silos that we have in our country. For our monuments we have the Ministry of Culture; then there is the issue of state government control and we’ve seen Rajasthan allow the tiger to vanish and the lakes in Udaipur to dry up. This one-window control mechanism should be allowed to cover the entire gamut of tourism and tourism-related activities: be it skiing in Gulmarg or visits to Gaya’s Buddha shrines.

This body will also need fiscal empowerment to ensure greater coordination in terms of both destination marketing as also in getting our so-called foreign outposts to become marketing arms rather than information disseminators. The fact that we almost always have a miserable presence at international travel fairs is quite another story and this is because no one seems bothered about getting revenues as long as cost heads are being met. This perhaps explains the state of marketing Brand India no matter what we might say about ‘Incredible India’. This was both premature and led to no conversion of purchase as far as Brand India was concerned, more so in an environment where basic infrastructure is deficient.

I would also expect this nodal body to re-examine the marketing construct as it were. India today is perhaps one of the few countries that offers a little of everything to any tourist seeking any one tourism offering: be it adventure, medical, spiritual, heritage or just plain urban tourism. For each of these, there cannot and must not be an overarching campaign or any single idea. There is no point in allowing consumer interpretation for the simple reason that for several years we have just not communicated; hence there is very limited exposure and this is true even of domestic tourism!

For example, in Kashmir there are the familiar holy cows: there is no imagination in either creating more destinations or for that matter more events, year-around, in the same destination. It is this lack of forward thinking that has crippled our tourism initiatives. We get excited because we have three million tourists. Singapore, which could fit into all of South Delhi alone, has eight million. And all it has to offer is malls and a bird park: or at the most Sentosa!

 

The marketing thrust has to be two-fold; multi-lingual and pan-global. We would be silly to assume that the best people to get to our country would be the usual suspects. We need to study historical linkages or perhaps interest amongst various nationalities and then pitch Brand India to them. There is no point in looking at Europe as one target market as we do. Or for that matter combining the Americas.

There is also greater need to target tourism initiatives to people of Indian origin and give them a taste of India through specifically tailor-made packages: an orientation to the country they perhaps left behind several decades ago. Las Vegas has made itself famous for weddings with just eleven chapels. And in our country we have a palace at almost every traffic light and yet we have not marketed our potential to create an entire wedding tourism business out of what we have except for the odd high-society wedding that gets talked about.

Alongside this marketing initiative, there is a need to redefine and perhaps reposition the offerings we have. I believe heritage tourism alone can have many sub-sets in terms of how we pitch it to prospective tourists: this is something that cannot be done by the Union government alone but will need the active implementation and intellectual involvement of the state governments.

 

Much has been written on tourism infrastructure. I believe we have done precious little and there seems to be no plan which is either consumer-friendly or for that matter consumer-sensitised: right from the way our airports and rail terminals are designed to creating sightseeing packages which eliminate the hardship and the touts. Tourism policing is a synonym for extortion rather than heightening the tourist’s experience, an aspect that will need to be looked at as well. The other problem with planning in our country is we have a restrictive year-definitive approach whereas in some cases we have to look beyond the proverbial five-year stretch if at all we are to make something meaningful of our tourism industry.

Our airports and rail terminals, not to mention our roadways, need complete overhauling but that will be possible only if we can ever move forward from the eternal privatization debate. This infrastructure programme must also include an initiative of funding by the corporate world, if required, of some of our monuments. If China can get American Express to sponsor the renovation of The Forbidden City, why are we so cagey about asking for money for good causes? Good money, be it from a multinational or from an Indian company to help with the upkeep of what is intrinsically India, can never be a bad thing. It is time we shed this hypocrisy.

 

In the final analysis, we have whipped tourism in our industry with the much-favoured, and now completely impractical, bouts of elitism and socialism. There is precious little which is either elitist or socialistic about encouraging tourism. Tourism is the lifeblood of any branding exercise that nations indulge in. The fact that Malaysia, and not India can communicate and own ‘Truly Asia’ is an indication of how terribly we’ve missed the positioning bus. We are equally moralistic about not encouraging nightlife at our tourist destinations: if tourism were to define our moral degradation, we would have been morally depraved when the early settlers landed at our shores. But obviously that has not happened and for us to continue to be held ransom to the phrase ‘Indian values and culture’ is again both a measure of our hypocrisy and our unwillingness to see the writing on the wall.

It is time for us to take tourism seriously. We cannot only be known as the land of the BPO or for that matter as a knowledge economy when we have so much going for us, which we have had little to do about. Our mountains and streams, our monuments and palaces need more than just an annual Christmas party. Our artisans cannot be held captive to night bazaars and Dilli Haats.

There is a world out there waiting for us to capture. We need to have the will and more importantly a plan. At present we have neither which is why we have become an overflying corridor than a landing proposition. More tourists overfly India to destinations as overrun as Phuket and Bali than come to what in reality is truly an incredible India!